


New Life

by samariumwriting



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Parenthood, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 07:14:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20093368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: After everything, Panne finally has the chance to settle down and start her future. Yet, holding her future in her arms, she can't help but worry about the future.





	New Life

**Author's Note:**

> Had a bit of fun writing this - I love Panne, and I love Yarne, but I hadn't thought to write anything about them before. I got a request for something like this aaaaages ago on discord so I thought I'd finally finish it up (before I fall down a Three Houses fanfic writing hole).

Panne was going to be honest; she never would have dreamed that this moment would come. Not in her whole life. She had- it had been a long, long time since she’d seen another Taguel. Only in the very earliest memories of her childhood, tinged with fear and sadness, could she ever remember the sight of another one of her kind.

Yet here, curled up in her arms, was a baby. He was yet to look much like a Taguel, but the signs were there. He didn’t have human ears, for one. He held at least some of her traits. He was a Taguel, something she had thought impossible for so long. She never thought she would be able to trust someone enough to have a child.

Vaike was elsewhere; he hadn’t known when the child was coming. She hadn’t really known, until the moment came. She had no one to teach her about how pregnancy worked, let alone when the baby was only half Taguel. They only had the proof of Yarne’s existence to show that it was even possible.

That was where the problem lay. Not in the bundle in her arms, but in her own inexperience. She did not remember ever encountering a Taguel baby before. Maybe she had, once, a long time ago, but she hadn’t learned anything from the experience, at the very least.

She didn’t know what to do, confronted with this tiny child. She could pull him close to her, keep him warm, though with the weather warm as it was she didn’t particularly need to. But any motherly instincts she may have been expected to have ended there.

Something she’d always insisted on during her pregnancy was that people let her be independent. She didn’t want people to fawn over her, to treat her like she was made of glass. She could never understand the way that pregnant women were treated by humans. They were practically worshipped.

That kind of thing made her rather uncomfortable, but the pregnancy was over now. She had a baby, and he was...well, she’d seen quite a few of her comrades have children now the war was over and they always said that their babies were beautiful. This baby was not beautiful in the slightest.

He was wrinkly, and ugly, and his eyes were all squinted and he kept crying. She knew it was healthy for a baby to cry, because it meant they had plenty of air in their lungs. But that didn’t mean she thought it was cute, or that she liked the way he looked. She really didn’t.

But there was still something beautiful about the moment that she couldn’t deny. Panne felt odd, buying into all those ideas of precious moments of life, rites of passage, those things that humans talked about. She didn’t give a damn about marriage, though it had made Vaike happy and that had made it special to her too.

She didn’t have all those things that families did together when she was a child, especially not things that human families did. She didn’t have birthdays, or siblings to share important moments of life with. She hadn’t even really had funerals or memorials, those things that had been so frequent in the wake of the war. There was none of that for her.

But now...there was a birth. A birth, for a child who would have a birthday every year, and he’d grow and say his first words, make his first steps, run wild, grow bigger. He would do all those things and Panne would be there to see all of it. In a way that she’d never been able to for the Yarne she knew.

Of course, the baby was called Yarne. She’d known that before she was even pregnant, because she sort of already had a son called Yarne, and that was a strange experience, but she didn’t feel like the choice had been taken away from her.

Because now, she could hold this younger Yarne in her arms and swear to him that she would not give him the life that the older Yarne had experienced. None of the fear, or the hardship. None of the loss, none of the neglect.

Holding Yarne in her arms, she felt that more strongly than she ever had before. The desire to protect him, this tiny child she’d created. And she didn’t cry, because she’d experienced so much worthy of tears in her life, but she did feel slightly overwhelmed by emotion.

Something she’d felt very keenly when she’d met the Yarne from the future for the first time was that she was no longer alone. That she would not be the last Taguel, even though she’d imagined that she would be for most of her life. And that was isolating. There was not a single person in the world who shared that feeling, no one she could really connect to over it.

But in another way, meeting Yarne hadn’t felt real. Her relationship with Vaike had barely progressed past a proposal on the spur of the moment when she met Yarne from the future. Having children felt like it would be a very long time away. And it had been a couple of years; Yarne had moved on to do other things, away from things that reminded him of his childhood.

But holding a baby in her arms...it was scary, but it was also incredibly fulfilling. She was not the last Taguel. She would not be responsible for the end of her race, the end of her people and culture. But that was also a source of worry for her, burdening a child with the task of continuing something that had almost been lost.

For her, it had always been something she had long accepted. She’d never anticipated having a child, so she’d had her whole life to accept that she was the end of her race. That there would be a time in the not so distant future that no one would ever meet a Taguel. At the time, it had been a source of sadness and almost grim satisfaction. She’d hoped that manspawn would forever feel guilty for what they had done.

And now...she had the chance to continue the Taguel. Yet, holding a tiny baby in her arms, she realised it would be far more difficult than she’d anticipated. She had to keep him fed properly, and keep him away from danger, but not too far away to coddle him and make it so he couldn’t defend himself. She didn’t want him to feel pressured, or afraid. She’d seen how those feelings had turned out in Yarne.

That was the other thing she feared. She knew Yarne, a different Yarne. And while he was strong, it was in a way she hoped her child would never have to be. Strong and endlessly afraid. Strong, but only because he’d overcome things that none should ever have to. Strong with steeled eyes and hardened palms and scarred skin in places where a young man should not have so many scars.

How would she take parenting cues when she knew someone so different to him already, but someone who also was him? Would she push him too hard in one direction or another because of preconceived ideas she had about what he would be like? Or would her own past interfere with his future?

It was hard to know how to act, or the challenges that she’d face now she had an additional role in her life. And the time for worrying would definitely come. Now, though...Panne was content to hold her son in her arms and smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! :) if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment, and if you have any writing requests please feel free to suggest them here or on twitter (@samariumwriting)


End file.
